Thinking about the areas of a standard normal distribution, if a z value is negative, is the area to the left of z less than 0.5000, greater than 0.5000 or equal to 0.5000?

A typical plot of the standard normal distribution is shown in the figure below.
The curve is symmetric about z = 0, and the total area under the curve is 1.

It follows that if the value of z is negative, the area to the left of z will be less than 0.5.

 The area to the left of z is less than 0.5000

The answer is 9.7 cm